Anyone with internet access has on average 150 online accounts, according to password manager app Dashlane. Since hackers regularly break into online sites, stealing usernames (typically email addresses), passwords, and god knows what else, many of us have been “pwned” (owned, in hacker lingo).
You could scan security news articles and alerts every day to see if one of the services you have an account with has been hacked. But Mozilla, the nonprofit behind the Firefox web browser, is proposing a better, automated way, called Firefox Monitor, by teaming up with a database of breached sites called HaveIBeenPwned.com, or HIBP.
The long-term plan, however, is to combine HIBP’s service with Mozilla’s in-development password manager, called Firefox Lockbox, which automatically stores and fills in usernames and passwords for websites you visit. If all goes well, a future version of Monitor (on desktop and mobile apps) will regularly check all these logins against the HIBP database to alert pwned users as soon as possible.